Winter Olympics 2010: Ghana's one-man ski team

... ready to capture public's imagination The Snow Leopard is crouched in his Italian office, which appears suspiciously like a ski hotel lobby, pawing and poring over a laptop. It is midnight and Kwame Nkrumah Acheampong, aka the Ghana ski team, looks dog tired.

Suggestions that he gets some kip are airily dismissed. He still has a 45-minute training session in the gym waiting in the wee hours, he protests, plus all these e-mails to answer, from fans to would-be sponsors to Olympic organisers. He has to be up at six for slalom practice after just three hours shut eye.

"No problem; choo, choo, I'm the train which never stops," he cackles. The computer beeps. "Jackpot!" It's a message from a major online poker site who want to back him because they think he will be the story of the Winter Olympics. You can bet on it; the unreal tale of the lone black African skier who, despite being self-taught on indoor English slopes, ignored by his home country and crippled by £10,000 debts, keeps alive an Olympic odyssey for six years through his own inventiveness, charm and bloody-mindedness until he finally makes history in Vancouver. Welcome to Cool Runnings transported to Milton Keynes, via Glasgow and Accra.

And here we are in his kingdom. Not his home Milton Keynes snowdome where the dream took flight but in Pampeago, a tiny resort village perched handsomely in the Italian Dolomites which, improbably, has adopted Kwame as its favourite son. For the fourth successive winter, the Val di Fiemme tourist board has provided him with free accommodation, food and skiing. In return, he gives them a fairytale in black and white. Anna, from the tourist board, makes a 35-year-old sound like a venerable national monument as she guides another bewitched film crew to his apartment. One year, Kwame got so many admiring visitors, his Italian coach quit in a huff. It used to be lonely for Kwame up there when he was "bus driver, coach, administrator, interim president, lone athlete" (and, naturally, founder) of the Ghana Ski Federation. His "fantastic" wife Sena holds the fort back home, working as an Open University administrator and looking after their two kids to help fund a fantasy she once thought barmy. "I'd go back to the apartment on my own and read the Bible," he recalls. This year, though, his unlikely cavalry has arrived to help him make the final push to Vancouver next month. There's his coach Denis Grigorev, a young Uzbekistani skier whose own Olympic hopes were dashed by his federation's administrative incompetence; his physical trainer Tim Allardyce, who's taking leave from his Surrey physio practice; and his manager Richard Harpham, who's supposed to be resting between mad kayaking adventures.

The trio have two things in common: (a) they can't be sure of getting paid when their boss never quite knows where the next Euro is coming from and (b) they don't care anyway because they've all been wooed by Kwame into living his dream. Heck, he is good at that. If British skiing really is close to bankruptcy, it should call for a man with enough ideas to dazzle a dozen Dragons' Dens.

As his mates crave sleep, he is still trying to track down a DHL parcel somewhere en route from Pakistan, where a manufacturer has knocked together the spotted ski suit which he has created for the Games. He shows me his designs. "Top secret," he says. "Now you have seen them, I will have to kill you." "CIAO, KWAME!" The next morning, from the ski lift attendant to the receptionists at the hotel he has commandeered for his one-man cottage industry, the salutation rings round the mountain. He loves everyone's warmth but still can't abide the cold after all these years. "I was not built for this pain, pain, pain. I still get frostbite," he says. His major race debut was in Val Thorens in 2005. "I was number 111, last to go in a blizzard, bitter cold and on a desperately icy piste. The starter asked me 'You OK?' and I said 'No, I don't want to go. But I must'. I finished last (by nearly half a minute) but I fought. And I survived." The story of his sporting life.

I meet him at the summit. It's minus 10, he offers a Tarzan exhortation and then flings himself down a vertiginous giant slalom course. And, suddenly, you remember. Never mind Leopard Sports Ltd and off-piste enterprise; this really is about skiing. Skiing well.

"I know I'm a novelty, that I'm odd. I cannot run away from that. But every time I'm on the slope, it's about proving 'Look, I actually can ski'." Er, best not to mention Eddie 'the Eagle' Edwards then. "I won't be seen as a joke figure," he demands.

Because while the flying Eagle plummeted like a dodo, dead last, in Calgary, the sliding Leopard has passed all the post-Eddie quality control tests designed to weed out Olympic 'tourists'. His skiing is ugly, a result of years of self-taught bad habits which makes Denis despair, but Kwame will be at the Games by right, not through sentiment.

"I'm determined not to finish last," he says. There's a guy from India, one from Pakistan and you can bet that the 51-year-old Mexican playboy Prince Hubertus of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, aka pop singer Andy Himalaya, hasn't been training demonically three times a day like Kwame.

He's waited too long to blow it now. "It's been one crazy ride," he smiles, taking me back to the start. He was born in Glasgow – of course he's skied in a kilt - while his Ghanaian dad, now a university professor, was studying for his doctorate.

The family returned to Africa when he was two and, after spells in Zambia and Nigeria, he became a top student tennis player and sprinter. But skiing? "Faraway on TV. I said to myself 'some day " The first time he saw snow was the day he flew into wintery Heathrow to pursue his Masters degree in tourism. Some omen, just like the part-time job in the Xscape Snowdome he took to help meet his tuition costs.

"I asked an instructor friend if he could give me a lesson. Half an hour, the only lesson I ever had – the rest I learned myself – but I believed straight away." The Olympic flame inside him was ignited.

He would ambush sponsors at ski shows, flog T-shirts, inspire his local paper to call him the Snow Leopard - "That reporter should have copyrighted it," he grins – and work all night in factories and call centres to make ends meet. In the summer, he would babysit the kids; in winter, he might sleep in his van or slog from Iceland to Iran in search of races. In 2006, he was about to make it to the Turin Olympics when, before the decisive qualifying race, his ski equipment got lost in transit to Iran. "I thought about quitting then," he said. "But here I am still." Italy adores him, Vancouver is mad for him, the IOC have provided a bursary but, throughout it all, Ghana's Olympic bosses, he claims, have looked the other way. "Use all the asterisks you want," he says when asked what he thinks of them. "I do everything myself".

Back at the hotel, the kit has finally arrived from Pakistan but the fabric is too thin for a frostbitten cat. "They must do it again," booms Kwame. It looks great, though, fittingly dazzling for what may prove the last time he wears the black star of Ghana in competition.

For next year, reality will take over. Time to see more of the blessed Sena, his six-year-old daughter Ellice and baby son Jason, and get those debts cleared. Oh, and catch some sleep.

But the dreaming will go on. He's found a gifted young athlete, Emmanuel Yemofio, in Ghana, and wants to put him on skis. "Look what I did, the guinea pig on no support. But he could be world-class. I'm raising funds to take him to Vancouver. I want him to be inspired.

"Then, when I'm gone, there'll be a new Snow Leopard cub. Stronger, younger and more aggressive than me." Ah, but not more remarkable than the original. Ciao, Kwame; no Olympian was ever more deserving.